Welcome to our shiny new blog

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If you’re new to our postgraduate careers blog at the University of Manchester, lovely to see you!

I’ll do the tour in a second, but just got to say hi to our regular readers – yup, it’s the same old postgrad careers blog, but now with a new, shorter address, a new outfit and we’re hanging out with our friends: the Graduate, Undergraduate, International and Media blogs.

So, what will you get here?
I write about anything related to careers – news, comment, events and vacancies – but from a postgraduate angle. It’s the same with the other blogs, so for example, if you’ve already graduated, I’d click on the graduate posts as well (even if you haven’t graduated, I’d have a look at that one – there’s some good stuff in there which I’ve pinched for the postgrad blog in the past).

And just to reassure you, it won’t be one of those blogs set up in surge of enthusiasm, which peters out before Christmas. I’ve been blogging on postgrad careers for 5 years now, and although I was keen to pull all our blogs together, my only regret is that my old blog will now never reach a quarter of a million page views (only had 16,500 to go…).

Blink and you may miss it
As it’s a blog, some posts will have a very short lifespan – the events they talk about will be over within a week or two of posting, so you’ll need to check it regularly if you don’t want to miss anything. If you haven’t used feeds yet, this might be a good time to investigate them. They’re a way of getting the news or blogs to come to you, in some sort of feedreader, without you having to visit lots of different websites. This could save you a lot of time, not just for careers, but for your postgrad subject.

If you really want up-to-the-minute news, have a look at our postgrad Twitter feed. I’ll often spot a news item or vacancy, and realise it’s not worth a full blog post (or I may not have time) so I’ll just tweet it. If the Olympics prodded you into having another look at Twitter, why not think about using it for picking up news for your career, or your research or your specialist subject?

This doesn’t sound like the university website …
Shhh, don’t tell them. As it’s not an “official” University of Manchester site, I can say what I want, and keep it informal. In reality, don’t expect anything too controversial – I love my job and I’m quite keen to keep it – but I will occasionally post off-topic (dancing squirrels may have appeared on the old blog at one point…). Just ignore these posts and wait for the next one to come along if you prefer your blog to be purely career-focused.

You’ve moved the furniture about – where is everything?
If you want to see all the postgrad posts in one page, just click on the word “Postgraduate” immediately below the “University of Manchester Careers Blog” header. That will bring up all the posts in the postgrad category. You’ll spot that if you hover your cursor over that same word, it also brings up a menu of other pages, all relating to postgraduates:

Online postgraduate careers talks – I do a set of standard postgrad careers talks each year, but for those who can’t get there, I post slides and record podcasts to go with them, so they’re available 24/7

If you’re looking at the site on a mobile device, some of this may be different. I do try to check the site on different formats and different browsers but apologies if something doesn’t work for you as it should.

How can I contact you/have my say?
Easy – just comment on any post. All comments are moderated, so if you want to send a comment but keep it private, just make that clear and I won’t publish it. We all love getting comments on our blogs, and I’ve written several new posts which have been prompted by comments. So, if you think a topic will be of interest to postgrads, and you want me to address it, just say so!